Counterfeit Skin by Yi-Sung Oliver Ho Poems

Meditative, playful and strange, the poems in Counterfeit Skin blend three distinct identities.

There are observational poems, deeply aware of lineage and history, friendship and family, travel and inhabitance, and the struggle to be a self tugged in many directions. Then there are poems by an often awestruck lover, who spurs the imagination on to confess love as a cephalopod but also fears what's unsayable in love, what love forgets to say until it's too late. Finally, there are poems that marvel at peculiar cultural artifacts, from kung fu and cartoons, to comic books, magic shops and post cards.

Acclaimed author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, poet Mike Young describes this collection as a book with "a great core heart...a surprising heart, the way the personal/historic concerns emerge as something directed at a lover, the way they get an urgency from a self not just trying to understand itself for its own sake but to be able to cast out toward another."

Yi-Sung Oliver Ho lives in Toronto. He has published several books for children, and his poetry and non-fiction have appeared in various magazines, including Descant, The New Quarterly and PopMatters. He has also written for the comic book anthology Holmes Incorporated, and co-written a sketch comedy revue that was performed on Toronto's Second City mainstage in 2012. He works at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. His website is www.OliverHo.ca.

Yi-Sung Oliver Ho lives in Toronto. He has published several books for children, and his poetry and non-fiction have appeared in various magazines, including Descant, The New Quarterly and PopMatters. He has also written for the comic book anthology Holmes Incorporated, and co-written a sketch comedy revue that was performed on Toronto's Second City mainstage in 2012. He works at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. His website is www.OliverHo.ca.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Counterfeit Skin

Kirkus Reviews

For example, in the poem “Memory Place,” Ho describes a shotgun’s “[t]rigger clicking…with the easy tension of our cat / When she leaps from the roof to go walking.” Later in the same poem, the speaker leaps off a pier into icy New Year’s Eve water, “[u]nder the watchful black eyes of a rooftop c...